My interest in Peter Bogdanovich, rather circuitously, began with Quentin Tarantino and Joan Didion. They came to me at a time when I was, through some serendipity of circumstance, completely ripe for the picking. It was May 2019, and I was getting increasingly disillusioned with the contemporary state of my two great artistic loves: film and literature. The world of letters felt an especially hopeless situation — I had just read what was widely seen as a “contemporary classic,” which I found, like most new fiction I’d read, completely styleless and totally forgettable. And just when I was questioning whether it was worth pursuing writing at all, whether the situation was irredeemably lost, whether good writing would ever get published or read again, I picked up a copy of Didion’s The White Album. And I fell for it… hard. Its clinical precision, its seductiveness, its epochal reminiscence — it was a touchstone moment for my sensibility, exposing me to the alluring ambiguity of late-60s and early-70s Hollywood, in all its sun-soaked gloominess.

Then, a month or so later, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood released, and even though I knew I was ready to be had, I could not have anticipated the extent to which the film spellbound me — there is nothing better than coming to exactly the right piece of art at exactly the right moment in time. The carefree sensibility, the stylishness of the era, the high-art/low-art playfulness, the virtuosic mastery of form — again, it’s the aesthetic which did me in (a phrase beginning to sound like a potential title for my autobiography.) But it was also a feeling, a foreboding that Didion had captured, which moved me. Watching the Golden Era of Hollywood finally come to a close in Tarantino’s glorious 70mm presentation, knowing that the endtimes were coming for that way of life, and that a profoundly divergent reality was to be birthed on August 8, 1969, I was utterly compelled. I grew nostalgic for the artfulness and dynamism of that time, even if I never lived through it. And so one I became obsessed with that era. One viewing turned into four or five, which turned into Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which turned into Eve Babitz, which turned into Shampoo, which turned into The Long Goodbye, and so on.

The end result is an infatuation with the New Hollywood that has maintained my critical interest for a long time now. I can’t be sure what it means to me, or why I identify with it so. My best guess is an aesthetic one. I can only deduce that my identification with art is spiritual as opposed to material – i.e. I can’t relate to the material circumstances, but only to the attitude, the aura, of the work. And I like it that way; I want to be seduced by the aesthetic sensibility of a piece of art, its style, its affect, its bravado. New Hollywood has style, it has bravado. It’s the glory of the technicolour Hollywood vision obscured and unsettled by moral realism and narrative unreliability.

And it is at this point, once I start digging into the annals of New Hollywood lore, into the films and the stories behind them, that I begin to see certain outliers which, being the obsessive I am, I must resolve. One outlier protrudes more noticeably than most: his name is Peter Bogdanovich, and the more that I learn about the New Hollywood era, the more I am confounded by the position he holds in its artistic maelstrom.

The matter isn’t simply one of relative aesthetic dissimilarity, which is easily reconcilable: not every New Hollywood film exerts a similar visual style, and nor does it have to. Rather, examining Bogdanovich’s work in the decade of New Hollywood — roughly, 1968 to 1979 — the filmmaker is making one thing pristinely clear: I am not with them. His is a New Hollywood filmography in name only; in sensibility, there’s a violent rejection of the kind of spiritual hollowness and existential writhing that categorises the classic New Hollywood works. In fact, Bogdanovich’s  oeuvre sits at such a critical distance that one would do better to describe him as anti-New Hollywood. Perhaps this explains why over the years, when asked about his relationship to his contemporaries, Bogdanovich has consistently responded rather lukewarmly, “we didn’t get along.”

The Sacred and Profane

To understand Bogdanovich’s sensibility, one could begin with his June 1973 essay “Sex and Violence,” published in Esquire. In it, Bogdanovich laments the abundance of exploitative and baseless sex and violence in the cinema of his day. In the years preceding, Sam Peckinpah had made The Getaway, Francis Ford Coppola had struck gold with The Godfather, Dirty Harry had been a hit, William Friedkin had made waves with The French Connection and films like Midnight Cowboy, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Last Tango in Paris established a new order for explicit content in films. And then Deep Throat came along, compelling Bogdanovich to pen his concerns about the implicit becoming explicit, and the consequences it would have for the cinema’s power to persuade. “If the glory of a good movie,” he writes, “is that it suspends one’s sense of disbelief, that it makes you forget you’re watching shadows on a wall and puts you instead into the world of illusion and magic, then the graphic portrayal of sexual intercourse on the screen will never work.” He continues: “Not being shown [the violent act is] so much more horrifying too, since our imagination, with some skilful assistance, can conjure up unspeakable and unspecific terrors no camera can equal.”

Bogdanovich therefore strove to eschew the excesses of contemporary films, creating a collection of works that catered to a wider array of tastes and sensibilities. Even though his first two features — Targets and The Last Picture Show — are more or less about violence and the end of (sexual) innocence, respectively, Bogdanovich displays a tactful, almost cunning ability to avoid intemperance. His handling of the material is subtle, tasteful and, above all, contained. There are no confronting close-ups, the camera rarely if ever lingers on the “action,” and even where there are profane acts, Bogdanovich refuses to have them serve exhibitionistic ends. Consider the full frontal nudity of the pool scene in The Last Picture Show, or the mass shooting that culminates in Targets (or even the abject frankness of Saint Jack) — these “obscenities” have an almost didactic quality to them. The acts are framed as sinful; the camera attributes to them a kind of moral pity. And for the characters who traverse the boundary, who commit the obscene transgressions, there is no reward in the end — only punishment.

“Sex and Violence” has an almost desultory tone to much of it, and Bogdanovich’s dissatisfaction with films like Bonnie and Clyde and Last Tango in Paris inevitably becomes an elegy for a different kind of movie, one that didn’t rely on the shock value of the profane act to engage the viewer. (In fact, Bogdanovich cites Bonnie and Clyde as an influence, in the sense of giving him something to rebel against: “The ending of Targets was based on Bonnie and Clyde,” he told Peter Biskind, “except that we didn’t have them shot up.”) Drawing from the Old World innocence of Hollywood’s Golden Age films, the essay is a lament to the coarseness of his time. In an interview with TCM, Bogdanovich concisely summated his philosophy: “Not everyone has to strip and say dirty words.”

Influence and Sensibility 

More is to be said about this idea of influence. Looking across the field of New Hollywood names, the influences are localised and consistent: Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Yasujirō Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, even writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Carl Jung — by and large, the European tradition. The inclinations of the New Hollywoodites appear directly related to the influence of the European forbearers, especially as it pertains to the psychological constitution of the films, which in turn impacted the aesthetic constitution. The visual style that reigned supreme during 1970s Hollywood, a style heavily suggestive of subjectivity — the obscurity of Gordon Willis’ lighting, the insistent camerawork of a Bob Altman picture, the manipulation of perspective in Alan Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy” — can be traced to the impact of the international stylists by whom the New Hollywood artists were so profoundly inspired.

It’s curious, then, to come across someone like Bogdanovich who was not overtly interested in auteurism and stylistic idiosyncrasy; not like Altman was, like Martin Scorsese was, like John Cassavetes or Peckinpah or Brian De Palma were. As Bogdanovich told an interviewer for The Seventh Art, “I’m trying to tell a story, not make a great shot. I don’t think audiences should be aware of technique.” And so his films don’t aspire to the aesthetic heights of La Nouvelle Vague or of Bergman. Bogdanovich’s is a much more conventionally inoffensive style, one that maintains its distance, its detachment, never attempting to assert too conspicuously the subjectivity of the camera. Such an invisibility of style is especially applicable to his work after The Last Picture Show, with films like What’s Up, Doc? and Daisy Miller, even Saint Jack to an extent — films that value the texts and the characters much more than visual flair. And it works: the tragedy of Daisy Miller’s death can only be suffused with gravity and resonance if the characters around her are sufficiently developed, so that her death means something ineffable but profound to them and to the viewer. For contrast, one might consider the shooting of Barbara Jean at the end of Robert Altman’s Nashville, a film so mired in style and thorny artfulness that the film’s climax simply cannot make a deeply personal cut into the viewer (but then, Altman’s purpose is wider cultural satire). Yet it is this kind of stylistic insistence which Bogdanovich’s New Hollywood-era films forego, in order that they all contain that deeply personal, humanist touch. Art historian Herbert Read argues, “the passivity of the artist is essential. You cannot take nature by storm”; one imagines Bogdanovich would agree.

Instead of an imported aesthetic inclination, Bogdanovich’s influences — to the extent that his work even contains a definable visual style — are of an entirely homegrown nature. Bogdanovich, who by age 30 supposedly had an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema to the tune of over 5000 films, came to prominence writing stories in Esquire about the last years of the old guard. This is not incidental; reading these pieces, which are collected in his book Pieces of Time, one remarks upon the unmistakeably sympathetic frame through which Bogdanovich views figures like Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturges — not simply their personalities, but their work as well. Indeed, it is perhaps because his tastes swung more towards Old Hollywood that he had such scant interest in transposing the European style. Martin Scorsese said that Bogdanovich was “the last person to make classical American cinema[.] To really utilize the wide frame and the use of the deep focal length. He really understood it.”

And yet even Bogdanovich’s stylistic influences play into the final product only in subdued tones; they’re certainly there on the screen, but one might have to do a bit of searching to pick them up. Take the deep focal lengths, wide expanses and moral largesse of Paper Moon, which bear traces of Welles (and Gregg Toland to be sure). The Last Picture Show, while nodding to Grapes of Wrath-era John Ford (which perhaps influenced Bogdanovich’s decision to film on-location), feels profoundly ageless and is shot rather unobtrusively. What’s Up, Doc? is doubtlessly a rollicking ode to Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis and Howard Hawks, but it is also retrofitted to a contemporary context, and importantly, played without the stiffness and stuffiness of certain Old Hollywood romantic comedies. Daisy Miller, in its own way, is obliquely influenced by the technique of silent films — what Bogdanovich calls “classic filmmaking […] where there’s no dialogue, where people look at each other, [where] it’s up to the viewer to take away what they mean.” The key scenes of Daisy Miller — the first encounter between Daisy and Winterbourne, or when Daisy sings ‘When You and I Were Young, Maggie’ — play out on that level, the level of the look, the level of pure cinema. Only, it isn’t silent.

The Old and the New

However, Bogdanovich maintains a curious evasiveness when discussing aesthetic influence, for he appears sceptical of the idea of stylistic propriety and idiosyncrasy. As he said about John Ford, “Ford was great at long shots, but he didn’t invent it.” What is more important to note, or at least seems more pressing a concern in Bogdanovich’s work, is a certain moral sensibility. The narrative curvatures and delineations of the films are ultimately shaped by the hand of Bogdanovich’s personal taste, of course; but it seems that the hand most insistently crafting the shape of the work is a moral and not an aesthetic one. 

In other words, as hinted at by the earlier mention of his pieces in Esquire, the spirit of a bygone era pervades the work. There is a certain innocence, a fanciful playfulness, that encompasses the tone of the films. In the world of Bogdanovich, viewers are a long way from the hard-boiled realism of A Clockwork Orange or Chinatown or The Long Goodbye, which all contain that certain totemic spirit of futility, one so prominent that the stories take on almost tragic proportions. No; much like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who concerned themselves with bringing back a magnanimity of spirit to Hollywood cinema, Bogdanovich is interested in portraying that impassioned moral goodness on the American screen. It is why the most interesting and developed characters of his films are usually women and children (and, for this reason, why Saint Jack, a hyper-masculine film, falls a little flat in Bogdanovich’s hands). And it is why his films are never dour and never grim (the closest he came was with The Last Picture Show, and even that has its moments of effervescence, of conviviality and charm.)

None of this is to say, however, that Bogdanovich viewed the Old World uncritically. He is not one for undiscerning nostalgia. Bogdanovich brings a modern sensibility to an Old Hollywood style, a combination which in large part explains the recent critical reappraisal of his work — he is proof that the heart of great cinema is transcendent, even when the window dressing changes. As he himself put it, “… that’s me. One foot in the past, one foot in the present.” For instance, his work has a frankness and openness that the Golden Age never did. Full-frontal nudity in The Last Picture Show, a mass shooting in Targets; these would not fly in 1939.

Bogdanovich’s criticism of the rather genteel, parochial, old-fashioned Golden Age affect is seen even in his first film. Boris Karloff’s role as Byron Orlok in Targets is essentially a dramatization of the growing gulf between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood, the limitations of the old-fashioned tradition when faced with the demands of the new world. In the film, Orlok — a man once considered the scariest of his time (like Karloff) — is now nothing more than an aging gentleman, completely neutered of his power to frighten (also like Karloff). Orlok has just completed a picture seeming to him so tepid that, after viewing it for the first time, he decides to never make a film again. It’s a penetrating and at times unsympathetic portrayal of an character who represents an idea: the idea of the uncritical application of Golden Age bluster to the cold hard truths of the modern age.

Yet not all is lost. Embittered and plaintful, facing down the barrel of the end of his relevance, there are only two choices that Orlok is left with in order to survive in the new order: fight or flight. His choice is flight, but by the end of Targets, he inadvertently must directly confront the reckoning that is coming for him, as a mass shooter has begun killing spectators in a Los Angeles drive-in who have come to see Orlok’s last film. And just as his cadaverous image is simultaneously projected on the enormous screen, a second Orlok — this one real — appears before the shooter and overwhelms him. (It is debateable whether Bogdanovich meant this ending to serve as a celebration of art’s power to overcome evil, or as a rebuke to the modern age’s dismissal of the traditions of the past. I have my money on the latter.)

The Problem with Nostalgia

But of course, in the end, something fell through the trappings. Just as the artistic impetus of the New Hollywood era became unworkable after the debacle of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, so had something turned sour in Bogdanovich by 1979. Perhaps embittered over the commercial and critical failures of his films from ’74 to ’76 — Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love, and Nickelodeon  — perhaps fed up with the complexities and sacrifices of the movie-making process, of having to relinquish creative control to the detriment of the coherence of the final product, Bogdanovich’s next film, Saint Jack, came after a three year recess from the business. The film is, perhaps unsurprisingly, tonally dark and somewhat flat. It lacks the pep, the vigour, the vivacity and wit and charm of Bogdanovich’s earlier work; it is disillusioned with, and distrustful of, its own characters; it oozes that familiar aura of deception and ambiguity that New Hollywood represented, one that had finally got to Bogdanovich by 1979. In short, Saint Jack is a reckoning of sorts, a filmmaker coming to terms with his embittering reality.

Perhaps all of this — the good, the bad, the pity, the exuberance, the earnest innocence, the old-fashioned taste, all of it — is why Bogdanovich speaks to me. I’m a nostalgic, I know; but I also realise the limitations of that sentiment. I’m aware of the obfuscation of reality that nostalgia brings with it. One simply cannot exist in the world without bringing a critical eye to everything they interact with, every piece of art they experience. Precisely because I enjoy the New Hollywood films so much, I want to be honest with myself about them; I want to grant them my critical eye, so that I may respect them for what they really are. So does Bogdanovich, not only to New Hollywood but to Old Hollywood as well. Honesty, playfulness and pleasure is the game here. Perhaps the sensibility is best summated by Pier Paolo Pasolini:

“I’m not looking for consolation. Like any human being, every now and then, I look for some small delight or satisfaction, but consolation is always rhetorical, insincere, unreal.”

And so, if New Hollywood was an attempt to shape the future in novel ways, Bogdanovich was manifestly more interested in looking back, in reaction over revolution, in conforming his artistic impulses to an unambiguously Golden Age Hollywood influence. He maintained that “the best movies are made in Hollywood” — and still, we debate whether “New” or “Old” should pre-empt it. Classification, much like nostalgia, is a temperamental game indeed.

Elroy Rosenberg is a writer, editor and louche layabout based in Melbourne. He is co-founder and editor of the upcoming Agora Magazine. Elroy’s work has been published by Grattan Street Press, Dog Door Cultural and Rough Cut Film, among others. Visit his website at elroyrosenberg.com.